The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  When, that month, Winston finally proposed to Pamela in a punt on the river while they were staying at Warwick Castle, he considered himself secretly engaged.18 But evidently he was too late, for almost immediately he returned to London he learned that two other young gentlemen also regarded themselves as secretly betrothed to Pamela. Not surprisingly, he was distraught. After a sleepless night pacing his bedroom at 105 Mount Street he went to see his Aunt Leonie and told her about it. Straight away she summoned her carriage and drove to confront Pamela, telling her firmly: ‘You can’t do this to my nephew.’19 When Jennie wrote later to Leonie to say she was concerned about Winston and Pamela’s relationship, Leonie replied: ‘Oh how I hope he won’t marry Pamela. She is not the wife for him although she is so pretty and attractive.’20 And one of Winston’s former senior officers,† writing to Leonie from South Africa, agreed: ‘I think Winston is quite right to have put off with dear little Pamela. She ought to be a rich man’s wife. But in any case she ought to be someone’s wife soon as Pamela must be “getting on”.’21

  Within days Pamela had accepted a proposal from Victor, Lord Lytton,‡ and the marriage was announced. There is no record of Winston’s reaction to this, but his earlier hurt suggests that it was an extremely painful episode for him. Pamela told Winston she hoped he would be ‘our best friend’, and he attended the wedding and continued to write to her affectionately for the remainder of their lives. Probably his duties as an MP and the sheer energy he threw into this task absorbed much of his emotional capacity. And now he was about to embark upon an ambitious literary project.

  Soon after Pamela’s marriage, the diarist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt* met Winston at a luncheon at the Lyttons’ home, and he recorded his impressions:

  I stopped to luncheon with Victor and Pamela and met there…Winston Churchill. He is a little, square-headed fellow of no very striking appearance, but of wit, intelligence, and originality. In mind and manner he is a strange replica of his father, with all his father’s suddenness and assurance, and I should say more than his father’s ability. There is just the same gaminerie and contempt of the conventional and the same engaging plain-spokenness and readiness to understand. As I listened to him recounting conversations he had had with Chamberlain I seemed once more to be listening to Randolph on the subject of Northcote and Salisbury…I should not be surprised if he had his father’s success. He has a power of writing Randolph never had, who was a schoolboy with his pen, and he has education and a political tradition. He interested me immensely.22

  After her first meeting with Winston, the teenage Violet Asquith† told her father, H.H. Asquith, that ‘for the first time in my life I had seen genius’. Asquith was tolerant and amused at his daughter’s enthusiastic description. ‘Well, Winston would certainly agree with you there,’ he replied. ‘But I am not sure you will find many others of the same mind. Still, I know exactly what you mean. He is not only remarkable but unique.’23 When she asked which of the two Asquith rated higher, Lord Randolph or Winston, he told her that it was not possible to compare them: ‘Randolph was irresistible. He had incomparably more charm, more wit. But – Winston is by far the better fellow of the two.’24

  Winston never set out to charm. It was not in him. With women he was inept, and he knew it. He spoke to them as he spoke to men, which did not always work. He noticed how confident Sunny was around women: ‘He is quite different from me, understanding women thoroughly, getting into touch with them at once, & absolutely dependent upon feminine influence of some kind for the peace & harmony of his soul.’25 Apart from his mother, female family members and the occasional girlfriend, there were few women in Winston’s life, and this possibly disadvantaged him in forthcoming confrontations with the women’s suffrage movement. Perhaps a more typical reaction than Violet Asquith’s was that of a new aunt-by-marriage, Daisy, sister of George Cornwallis-West, who met Winston at Jennie’s wedding. She wrote that she met him with mixed feelings, for what she had heard about him was not complimentary, and she was not won over. ‘I cannot say I ever cared for him much.’

  But without question, even in these very early days of his career, Winston possessed some special qualities that were evident to anyone who met him, whether they liked him – and these qualities – or not. Equally without question, his overt ambition, his bombast and his vigorous criticism of his own party’s policies set many fellow MPs against him. At times he seemed to enjoy causing resentment, and some thought he was merely carrying on where his father had left off. Others believed he was out to get anyone who had crossed his father, and he certainly appeared to carry a chip on his shoulder on account of his father’s treatment by the House. It is possible that the anger he felt at his father’s rejection of himself found an outlet in his fury at his father’s critics.

  It was at this time, in the summer of 1902, that Winston approached his father’s literary executors and told them he wished to write a political biography of Lord Randolph. With hindsight at least, there could have been no one in the world more qualified, yet the request threw the executors into confusion as they were unsure as to the precise extent of their duties. Would they have to strictly control what was written about the subject? Would they be responsible for editing the proposed book? Winston was firm with them, as usual finding apposite words and argument: ‘I strongly incline to the belief that the duty of the literary executors is discharged when, to the best of their judgement, they have selected a suitable biographer. Questions of style, of literary taste, of the scope of the work…are all matters upon which opinion will very often be divided. A syndicate may write an encyclopaedia, only a man can write a book.’26 The executors gave in gracefully. For the next three and a half years Winston would devote every spare moment to this task, which in many ways would prove cathartic. After its completion he would seem at peace in relation to Lord Randolph’s memory, as though he had done all he could to answer his father’s enemies and lay all the ghosts.

  Sunny Marlborough, meanwhile, having played a major role on Jennie’s wedding day, had returned from South Africa to dissension in his own marriage. He and Consuelo were scarcely on speaking terms, not helped by rumours that during his absence Consuelo had enjoyed a relationship (and almost certainly a discreet affair) with the fashionable Society portrait artist Paul Helleu, who had gone to Blenheim in May 1900 to produce a series of portraits of Consuelo. At the very least, ‘a great friendship’27 had resulted, which involved the exchange of gifts such as engraved silver cigarette cases. While not believing Consuelo had actually committed adultery, the Duke found it unpleasant to have his wife the subject of gossip. But he was far more angry when he was overlooked for the post he coveted of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland because, as he came to believe, Consuelo had made it known in Society that she would dearly like to be Vicereine. Her remarks were commented upon in the press and when the Queen got to hear of it she was annoyed, so Marlborough’s name was removed from the list of possibilities. When the Marlboroughs travelled abroad that year, the papers noted that they did not even sleep in the same buildings, let alone the same rooms. This was a marriage in deep trouble.

  In her letters Consuelo noted how much respect the Duke had for his younger cousin when he visited Blenheim: ‘Sunny is still attentive to Winston’s every remark – a great sign of friendship,’ she wrote. ‘Winston is still on the talk – never stops and really it becomes tiring.’28

  It was against this background that Gladys Deacon paid her second visit to Blenheim. Since her first visit there as a teenager, she had subjugated a number of men in Italy. With her long slender legs and exquisite slight figure, she was described as ‘more like a nymph than mortal…her fine red-gold hair framed her face and illuminated her fair skin; her eyes were blue fires. The fascinating little kink at the bridge of her nose added poignancy to her beauty – an endearing hint of imperfection which saved it from being too classically severe.’ She was also endowed with wit, intelligence and radiance, and a cosmopolitan sophistication. Fu
ll of spontaneous gaiety, she illuminated the Blenheim house parties – even, to Consuelo’s surprise, teasing Sunny into laughter. She now proceeded to enthral not only Sunny but his cousin (and former best man) Ivor Guest, who was a fellow house guest. Confused and jealous, realising that he had no right to fall in love with his wife’s friend, Marlborough left and went to Harrogate ‘for a health cure’ from where he wrote a series of letters to Gladys in French, frankly expressing his feelings for her while deprecating his chances of any reciprocation.

  When he returned to Blenheim to host a visit of the nineteen-year-old Crown Prince of Germany, who was accompanied by the German Ambassador, Count Metternich and a number of courtiers, Sunny had to watch the Crown Prince suffer the same fate as himself and his cousin Ivor. The Prince fell instantly in love with Gladys, who appeared unaffected by all the adulation flowing in her direction. The Prince was speedily removed from her vicinity so as to avoid a diplomatic incident, but not before they had exchanged tokens of jewellery. But there was a leak, and an ‘exclusive’ story, that the Prince and Gladys were engaged, appeared in Paris Matin. It was promptly denied by the German government, but soon afterwards, when Consuelo and Gladys travelled together on a tour of Dresden and Berlin, they were escorted everywhere by a high-profile German nobleman. Consuelo was not slow to realise that the purpose of this escort was to prevent a meeting between Gladys and the Crown Prince, rather than a mark of courtesy. Consuelo had never had a close woman friend and during this trip she too fell under Gladys’s spell. Afterwards, the two women sent each other daily letters in which they used pet names (Consuelo was ‘Coon’) and exchanged locks of hair. Gladys confided to a friend at this time that Consuelo was in low spirits because Marlborough insisted on his marital rights, and made ‘wild’ love to her.29 Perhaps this was the reason why, soon after her return from Germany, Consuelo visited her mother in Newport – for the first time since her marriage.

  The end of that year, 1901, was to have tragic consequences for the twenty-four-year-old Consuelo. While she and Sunny were visiting Russia she caught a head cold, which led to an ear infection that left her slightly deaf. Unfortunately, this deafness did not clear up and successive specialists were unable to help. Until the invention of miniature hearing aids many years later, this was the beginning of a life increasingly spent on the periphery of conversations and excluded from the whisperings and gossip-mongering among family and friends. She wrote that she felt more isolated and unhappy than ever at this time, although some months later George Cornwallis-West’s sister, Princess Daisy of Pless, reported that Consuelo, while in Vienna for treatment for her deafness, had been ‘flirting outrageously’ with an Austrian prince. ‘She is looking very well,’ Princess Daisy noted, ‘and I think fascinatingly pretty, with her funny little turned up nose and big brown eyes…She leaves here tomorrow for England and from there goes to India* for the Durbar.’30

  After the Marlboroughs had left for India as the personal guests of Lord Curzon, Gladys went to stay with her mother where she suffered a nervous breakdown. She was admitted to a Paris clinic where she spent days lying on a bed and gazing at her face in a mirror. While there, she commissioned some cosmetic surgery, which was to be the biggest mistake of her life. Admiring reports of her physical appearance up to this point are so numerous that her beauty may be taken for granted. However, she disliked the small imperfection on the bridge of her nose and aspired to the pure aquiline ‘Grecian’ look of her sister. Perhaps it seemed to her a good opportunity, with her friends so far away, to correct this. So she underwent a process whereby warm paraffin wax was injected into her nose to smooth over the imperfection. Visitors at the time noted that her nose was red and swollen, but in correspondence they seemed more concerned with her mental state. Just before the Marlboroughs were due to arrive in Paris in April Gladys appeared to make a complete recovery, and discharged herself from the clinic. For some years the cosmetic procedure worked, but Gladys’s apparently minor decision, made at a time when her mental health was fragile, was to haunt her in later years.

  Sunny was as besotted as ever and sent her a flurry of agonised notes; but Gladys had plenty of men at her feet, among them several dukes, one of whom was the widowed Duke of Norfolk, the premier nobleman* in England. Marriage to him would place her above Consuelo in order of precedence, but Gladys seemed happy merely to flirt with him. Other admirers were as obsessed as Sunny, but she remained unaffected, emotionally, by any of them.

  Winston spent most of the summer at Blenheim in a suite of rooms made over to him in order to allow him to work quietly on Lord Randolph’s biography. His Aunt Cornelia’s sons Ivor and Freddie Guest visited, as did Jack, and Sunny’s mother Goosie whom Consuelo liked. The stream of visitors at least made it easier for Consuelo and Sunny to live in the same house. When the visitors departed, Consuelo was often lonely there, but the gift of a new electric brougham from her father enabled her to drive around the estate without a groom, giving her a degree of freedom she had hitherto never known.

  In 1903 Sunny was appointed Under-Secretary for the Colonies in Arthur Balfour’s government, at about the time that the Marlboroughs took possession of their newly built London home, Sunderland House, in Curzon Street. This was a gift to Consuelo from her father (now happily remarried to Anne Rutherfurd* and living in Paris), and was built on the site of the old Curzon Street chapel. Here Consuelo was able to enjoy the modern heating, bathrooms and plumbing that were lacking at Blenheim. And she was at last able to furnish a home with the French antique furniture that she – and her mother – loved.

  With the Duke’s political career taking off, the London house was in constant use for entertaining. This gave Consuelo a raison d’être for a while, but though she liked political debate and attended sessions in the gallery of the House of Lords where she had a seat, her poor hearing impeded her enjoyment. Also, she was not a born political hostess and lacked the flair for it that came so naturally to Jennie. Jennie and her new sister-in-law Princess Daisy, who were both frequent guests at Consuelo’s dinners, receptions and soirées in London, considered the dining room at Sunderland House ‘pokey’. The ceiling was too low, they thought, and as it was on the ground floor and overlooking the street the windows had to be screened. After the novelty had worn off, Consuelo found the receptions ‘by no means a pleasure’.31 Not only did she find them tedious, but she grew to feel that her taste was being criticised. Left alone for a good deal of the time between these entertainments, she was searching for a life of her own; and that, for a woman of her class at that time, meant only one thing: charitable work. She had helped Jennie equip the hospital ship the Maine for the Boer War, but she could not leave her two boys to accompany Jennie to South Africa. Perhaps it was just as well, since both Jennie and her sister Clara were united in feeling that while Consuelo was a willing recruit she was also something of a handicap, except for her bottomless purse. However, by now Consuelo’s deafness was getting worse, and at just the time when her marriage was at a lower ebb than ever.

  Both Marlboroughs wrote regularly to Gladys, and from their letters it is clear that neither knew what the other wrote. When Gladys’s sister died, the Marlboroughs each wrote fondly to her – in Sunny’s case, the tortured letter of a man coming to terms with rejection after Gladys had refused to allow him to visit her in Italy at her mother’s home. He had ‘experienced such difficulty in resigning myself to the position of one who no longer may claim to be included in the inner circle of your…thoughts and emotions’.32 He pleaded with her not to treat him merely as just another of her many admirers; yet she was a young single woman and he was a married man – and married, moreover, to her supposed best friend. How was she to answer? The Duke’s letter suggests that there may have been some intimacy in the past, which, he now realised, would no longer be allowed.

  Consuelo wrote: ‘I love you, & feel for you and you want love and sympathy now…Gladys dear I want you too, I long for your clever and deep thoughts [and]…all
that makes you so attractive and dear.’ By now neither of the Marlboroughs was attempting to make their marriage work or even pretending to. They would be seen together at balls and dinners, but only for the sake of appearances. Consuelo still had few friends, and Gladys was clearly very important to her. Love between women friends, she wrote, was purer than that between man and woman because a man’s love for a woman was selfish and self-interested. She had been unhappily married for nine years, had done her duty and provided the next links in the chain. Now, needing her freedom, it is likely she had broached the matter with her father, who was building up his stable of racehorses in Paris. He was sympathetic to Consuelo’s misery.

  That year, 1904, Winston’s life took an unexpected direction. In favour of free trade, increasingly now he found himself at odds with the Conservative government’s policy of protectionism and in sympathy with Lloyd George’s Liberals. He had, in any case, long been a closet Liberal, and on the last day of May, feeling powerless to make any impact on his own party’s direction he crossed the floor of the House and sat with the Opposition. It was not a dramatic occasion, although the newspapers would later make it one: he simply entered the Chamber and, instead of making for the government benches, walked towards his father’s old seat on the front bench below the gangway. The seat next to him was occupied by Lloyd George, who grasped Winston’s hand. This defection, his daughter Mary would write, ‘caused him to be regarded as a renegade in the eyes of his own party, and by many others as a traitor to his class’.33 Most incorrectly believed that he was succumbing to a fit of the sulks because he had not been given high office by the Tories, and even at the end of his life after a glorious career this act of defection would still be held against him by his critics. Certainly, it was sensational in Winston’s circles – a strange parallel of his father’s behaviour and a protest against superiors who would not listen to him. It could easily have ended his political chances. Winston was now twenty-nine, and the career that had looked so promising appeared to have stalled. His cousins Ivor and Freddie Guest, both Conservative MPs, defected to the Liberals at the same time – to the fury of their mother, Winston’s aunt Cornelia. In fact, Winston was able to steer the matter in a positive direction in his speeches by pointing out that his actions had been dictated by his conscience and by the people who elected him to speak for them, rather than slavishly reflecting the party line.